Answers to Correspondents
VIGILANS—The Laws of Auroral Derangements are still imperfectly understood. Any overheated motor may of course "seize" without warning; but so many complaints have reached us of accidents similar to yours while shooting the Aurora that we are inclined to believe with Lavalle that the upper strata of the Aurora Borealis are practically one big electric "leak," and that the paralysis of your engines was due to complete magnetization of all metallic parts. Low–flying planes often "glue up" when near the Magnetic Pole, and there is no reason in science why the same disability should not be experienced at higher levels when the Auroras are "delivering" strongly.
INDIGNANT—On your own showing, you were not under control. That you could not hoist the necessary N. U. C. lights on approaching a traffic–lane because your electrics had short–circuited is a misfortune which might befall any one. The A. B. C., being responsible for the planet's traffic, cannot, however, make allowance for this kind of misfortune. A reference to the Code will show that you were fined on the lower scale.
PLANISTON—(1) The Five Thousand Kilometre (overland) was won last year by L. V. Rautsch, R. M. Rautsch, his brother, in the same week pulling off the Ten Thousand (oversea). R. M.'s average worked out at a fraction over 500 kilometres per hour, thus constituting a record. (2) Theoretically, there is no limit to the lift of a dirigible. For commercial and practical purposes 15,000 tons is accepted as the most manageable.
PATERFAMILIAS—None whatever. He is liable for direct damage both to your chimneys and any collateral damage caused by fall of bricks into garden, etc., etc. Bodily inconvenience and mental anguish may be included, but the average jury are not, as a rule, men of sentiment. If you can prove that his grapnel removed any portion of your roof, you had better rest your case on decoverture of domicile (See Parkins v. Duboulay). We entirely sympathize with your position, but the night of the 14th was stormy and confused, and—you may have to anchor on a stranger's chimney yourself some night. Verbum sap!
ALDEBARAN—War, as a paying concern, ceased in 1967. (2) The Convention of London expressly reserves to every nation the right of waging war so long as it does not interfere with the world's traffic. (3) The A. B. C. was constituted in 1949.
L. M. D.—Keep her dead head–on at half–power, taking advantage of the lulls to speed up and creep into it. She will strain much less this way than in quartering across a gale. (2) Nothing is to be gained by reversing into a following gale, and there is always risk of a turn–over. (3) The formulæ for stun'sle brakes are uniformly unreliable, and will continue to be so as long as air is compressible.
PEGAMOID—Personally we prefer glass or flux compounds to any other material for winter work nose–caps as being absolutely non–hygroscopic. (2) We cannot recommend any particular make.
PULMONAR—For the symptoms you describe, try the Gobi Desert Sanitaria. The low levels of the Saharan Sanitaria are against them except at the outset of the disease. (2) We do not recommend boarding–houses or hotels in this column.
BEGINNER—On still days the air above a large inhabited city being slightly warmer—i. e., thinner—than the atmosphere of the surrounding country, a plane drops a little on entering the rarefied area, precisely as a ship sinks a little in fresh water. Hence the phenomena of "jolt" and your "inexplicable collisions" with factory chimneys. In air, as on earth, it is safest to fly high.
EMERGENCY—There is only one rule of the road in air, earth, and water. Do you want the firmament to yourself?
PICCIOLA—Both Poles have been overdone in Art and Literature. Leave them to Science for the next twenty years. You did not send a stamp with your verses.
NORTH NIGERIA—The Mark Boat was within her right in warning you up on the Reserve. The shadow of a low–flying dirigible scares the game. You can buy all the photos you need at Sokoto.
NEW ERA—It is not etiquette to overcross an A. B. C. official's boat without asking permission. He is one of the body responsible for the planet's traffic, and for that reason must not be interfered with. You, presumably, are out on your own business or pleasure, and should leave him alone. For humanity's sake don't try to be "democratic."
Reviews
The Life of Xavier Lavalle
(Reviewed by Réné Talland. École Aëronautique, Paris)
Ten years ago Lavalle, "that imperturbable dreamer of the heavens," as Lazareff hailed him, gathered together the fruits of a lifetime's labour, and gave it, with well–justified contempt, to a world bound hand and foot to Barald's Theory of Vertices and "compensating electric nodes." "They shall see," he wrote—in that immortal postscript to "The Heart of the Cyclone"—"the Laws whose existence they derided written in fire beneath them."
"But even here," he continues, "there is no finality. Better a thousand times my conclusions should be discredited than that my dead name should lie across the threshold of the temple of Science—a bar to further inquiry."
So died Lavalle—a prince of the Powers of the Air, and even at his funeral Céllier jested at "him who had gone to discover the secrets of the Aurora Borealis."
If I choose thus to be banal, it is only to remind you that Céllier's theories are to–day as exploded as the ludicrous deductions of the Spanish school. In the place of their fugitive and warring dreams we have, definitely, Lavalle's Law of the Cyclone which he surprised in darkness and cold at the foot of the overarching throne of the Aurora Borealis. It is there that I, intent on my own investigations, have passed and re–passed a hundred times the worn leonine face, white as the snow beneath him, furrowed with wrinkles like the seams and gashes upon the North Cape; the nervous hand, integrally a part of the mechanism of his flighter; and above all, the wonderful lambent eyes turned to the zenith.
"Master," I would cry as I moved respectfully beneath him, "what is it you seek to–day?" and always the answer, clear and without doubt, from above: "The old secret, my son!"
The immense egotism of youth forced me on my own path, but (cry of the human always!) had I known—if I had known—I would many times have bartered my poor laurels for the privilege, such as Tinsley and Herrera possess, of having aided him in his monumental researches.
It is to the filial piety of Victor Lavalle that we owe the two volumes consecrated to the ground–life of his father, so full of the holy intimacies of the domestic hearth. Once returned from the abysms of the utter North to that little house upon the outskirts of Meudon, it was not the philosopher, the daring observer, the man of iron energy that imposed himself on his family, but a fat and even plaintive jester, a farceur incarnate and kindly, the co–equal of his children, and, it must be written, not seldom the comic despair of Madame Lavalle, who, as she writes five years after the marriage, to her venerable mother, found "in this unequalled intellect whose name I bear the abandon of a large and very untidy boy." Here is her letter:
"Xavier returned from I do not know where at midnight, absorbed in calculations on the eternal question of his Aurora—la belle Aurore, whom I begin to hate. Instead of anchoring—I had set out the guide–light above our roof, so he had but to descend and fasten the plane—he wandered, profoundly distracted, above the town with his anchor down! Figure to yourself, dear mother, it is the roof of the mayor's house that the grapnel first engages! That I do not regret, for the mayor's wife and I are not sympathetic; but when Xavier uproots my pet araucaria and bears it across the garden into the conservatory I protest at the top of my voice. Little Victor in his night–clothes runs to the window, enormously amused at the parabolic flight without reason, for it is too dark to see the grapnel, of my prized tree. The Mayor of Meudon thunders at our door in the name of the Law, demanding, I suppose, my husband's head. Here is the conversation through the megaphone—Xavier is two hundred feet above us.